Random access memories: My time at a singularity conference

Androids, millionaires, and idealism at a summit on the singularity.

I'm sitting in the far left corner of Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in New York, in a dark spot under the balcony, watching a man who is not a man.

On the brightly lit stage, the man sits comfortably in an Aeron desk chair, hair falling into his eyes as he gazes idly about the room through glasses, hands in lap. The emcee of the Global Future 2045 conference, Phil VanNedervelde, introduces him as Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligence Robotics Laboratory in Osaka, Japan. He's a leading expert in the creation of lifelike robots. As VanNedervelde steps off stage, the man looks around at the crowd and begins to speak.

"In order to investigate humans, we need to have a test bed. I am the test bed," he says. "The professor is using myself to study the Hiroshi likeness. I am the most important research he has out... Now, let's welcome professor Ishiguro." With that, the professor himself strides onto the stage and the "man" in the chair is revealed as Ishiguro's hyperrealistic robotic doppelgänger.

Wait 30 years, and the distinction between the "man" and the "machine" might not be so easy to make. If the conference organizer, Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov, has his way, robots like Ishiguro's will make us immortal—perhaps as soon as 2045.

Consciousness transfer

The conference I attended in June is the product of Itskov's 2045 Initiative, which has set itself the goal of transferring "an individual's personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier." The side effect of that ability to transfer personalities would be that one never has to die with a body; they would become, potentially, immortal.

Itskov made the money that funds the 2045 Initiative with a blog about the Russian Internet, tarakan.ru, and an online newspaper, Dni.ru, according to a New York Times profile. This developed into a company, New Media Stars, with ties into the Russian government. Partial ownership of the company eventually made Itskov rich, but it did not prove fulfilling. Itskov, who now lives more like an ascetic monk than a tech multimillionaire, spends his life promoting the 2045 Initiative in the hopes of overcoming humanity's limited span of years.

The first step in Itskov's plan is creating android avatars that are controllable by a brain-machine interface. According to the 2045 Initiative, this will give humans the "ability to work in dangerous environments" without personal risk. The androids, which are somehow both more capable and more expendable than the average human, should appear by 2020 if all goes well.

By 2025, the medical and technological communities should work out how to make an "autonomous life support system for human brains," to save people whose bodies are "worn out." Once the brains are pickled away in their Mason jars, the goal is to recreate the brain as a kind of computer by 2030, enabling people to transfer their consciousnesses to another host. These minds that are now "substrate-independent" should eventually be transferable into new bodies with "capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans." In sum: transferable consciousnesses into artificial bodies by 2045.

Enlarge/ Dmitry Itskov opens his conference, touting the need for open discussion.

The 2045 Initiative's mission, described more broadly, is associated with the "technological singularity," the point at which humans achieve superintelligence aided by technology. The singularity is the Big Bang but reversed. With the Big Bang, the shift of everything into existence was so sudden and radical that we don't currently have a reasonable way of figuring out what came before. Proponents of the singularity say that the changes would be such a significant tipping point in the way our world operates that we have no way of predicting what will come after.

We can look to the greats of science fiction for some predictions on what might come of a singularity. They almost universally foresee disaster—the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica, the replicants of Blade Runner, the circumventions of Asimov's laws of robotics. Supporters of the singularity see more upsides.

While Itskov has a general plan, the specifics of getting to consciousness transfer by 2045 remain murky. Even the question of how to achieve the first landmark goal in GF2045's timeline—affordable android avatars controllable by brain-machine interfaces by 2020—is yet unanswered. Skeptical, I attended the conference hoping to see someone, anyone, indicate that even the first step of the 2045 Initiative's timeline was attainable, let alone practical.

The personal motivations of the singularity have to do with overcoming the “imperfections” of humans: we are temporary, physically restricted in capability and location, and not smart enough. Each of us dimly ambles through life and makes the planet a little worse with each pass. Singularity boosters aren’t the first sect to target immortality, but they might be the first group motivated enough to try to systematize it.

The morning of the first day of the conference, the lobby was quiet as a few dozen attendants milled around while a flute and guitar filled the room with high-brow music. I started talking to a wide-eyed gentleman who sang the praises of TA-65, an expensive “telomerase activator” that is supposed to slow the aging process. “When I’m about 35, I’m probably going to start it,” he said.

The young man said he was at the conference to see longtime singularity booster Ray Kurzweil. He had not read any of Kurzweil’s books, but he watched his videos online. “You’ve heard of YouTube?” he asked.

Some supporters of the singularity movement tend to be focused on their personal well-being. At a minimum, they want to live as long as possible so they can live to see the advancements that will make them smarter and better.

But the singularity also has a larger purpose to them. Refining humans to perfect living, feeling androids would bring immortality, the reduction of disease and suffering (as we know them from our human position anyway), and the ability to regulate people's needs in a way that is compatible with a planet and ecosystem that prove time and again to be too fragile to compete with our wanton desires for power, convenience, and dominance.

Enlarge/ Dr. James Martin predicts the various impending disaster scenarios for humanity.

Dr. James Martin, an IT consultant and early employee of IBM, opened the conference with an hour-long rundown of the problems facing the planet (like climate change) and how they are influenced in large part by an overgrown human population. Dr. Martin called this "the make or break century," the moment we could see "the birth of a global renaissance or things descend into chaos. Or both." Put more succinctly, things will change.

As Martin ran through his list of damning statistics—including the frightening number of cows and their resulting volume of gas emissions—it's hard to shake the feeling that the presentation is a massive troll of a room full of people who have at least a passing interest in living forever. We're ruining the planet because... we're living too long and reproducing too often? Obviously the solution is to advance technology to the point where no one needs to die!

But Martin pointed out that a state of consciousness housed in some abstraction of a human body might lead to huge advantages. An android doesn't need all those cows, for instance—or even a temperate planet. As I listened, it hit me: Dr. Martin was describing all of the problems that won't be problems once people aren't people anymore.

Martin's consciousness won't be one of those transferred to an android, however. Several days after speaking at the conference, Martin passed away in a swimming accident.

172 Reader Comments

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

I guess it's not for me.

Inb4: the Star Trek "transporter" discussion. Well played, Dr McCoy.

From these discussion I learned that some take comfort in the idea that any consciousness containing their identity is enough. One person claimed the notion of Self, intrinsically linked to a local stream of consciousness is but a self-absorbed fairy tale and rather irrelevant compared to the convenience of FTL travel. The reasoning is beyond me.

Then Caprica got cancelled, and the novelty of a truly Hegelian concept of consciousness-transfer never got a chance to enter the debate

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Perhaps it's part of being raised in the heart of the Rust Belt, but I never have much patience with these utopian scenarios. Living next door to last century's broken Faustian fantasies has disillusioned me to the current ones.

Life for humanity might improve in aggregate, but there will always be an animal in you. On evolutionary time scales we aren't far from hunter-gatherers on the plains.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

I guess it's not for me.

Inb4: the Star Trek "transporter" discussion. Well played, Dr McCoy.

Transporters? The analogy here is clearly Soong-type androids; don't forget that Soong transferred the consciousness of his wife into an android so effectively that she didn't even realize that she was an android.

I'm an athiest. There's no special magic inside me powering my brain. It's all physics and chemistry and science. We'll be able to reproduce that in machinery and computers one day, or just upgrade what I have now so it lasts. I want that to happen before I die, or at least before my children die. Before my parents die seems unlikely, but I can hope.

No, I don't know the answers to all the many objections. But I would rather face those problems than die.

"Consciousness transfer" our Russian billionaire has spent far, far too much time reading science fiction compared to actual science. Want to be immortal? Just invest in life extending drugs, we know they work, if averages work out they'll be on the market, an actual reality, in maybe a decades time.

I mean, it's cool that billionaires are doing "crazy super villain" stuff with there money, better than just buying another stupid yacht anyway. But at least do what Sergey Brin is doing and invest in something that will actually WORK.

I think the world may be better off if previous generations die (in their due time). Can you imagine growing up as a child, knowing that the grown-ups will always be there, and will always consider you a junior member of society, forever? Imagine the generation gap in that world.

I'm an athiest. There's no special magic inside me powering my brain. It's all physics and chemistry and science. We'll be able to reproduce that in machinery and computers one day, or just upgrade what I have now so it lasts. I want that to happen before I die, or at least before my children die. Before my parents die seems unlikely, but I can hope.

No, I don't know the answers to all the many objections. But I would rather face those problems than die.

You do realize these are the same drivers behind religion. I really see this optimism about technological immortality as essentially the same wishful thinking as religious immortality.

At best in our lifetime, I would expect the best we could do is create technological ghosts to comfort/haunt the living.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Indeed, the idea of consciousness transfer is just nonsense. You will die and a separate entity will continue to act like you, talk like you but it will not be you.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

I guess it's not for me.

Inb4: the Star Trek "transporter" discussion. Well played, Dr McCoy.

Transporters? The analogy here is clearly Soong-type androids; don't forget that Soong transferred the consciousness of his wife into an android so effectively that she didn't even realize that she was an android.

But, in spirit of the Star Trek universe, the metaphysics concerning to the stream-of-consciousness should apply the same to androids as to the carbon copies produced by the transporter. Excuse the recycling of matter to energy to matter in the latter.

I'm an athiest. There's no special magic inside me powering my brain. It's all physics and chemistry and science. We'll be able to reproduce that in machinery and computers one day, or just upgrade what I have now so it lasts. I want that to happen before I die, or at least before my children die. Before my parents die seems unlikely, but I can hope.

No, I don't know the answers to all the many objections. But I would rather face those problems than die.

You do realize these are the same drivers behind religion. I really see this optimism about technological immortality as essentially the same wishful thinking as religious immortality.

At best in our lifetime, I would expect the best we could do is create technological ghosts to comfort/haunt the living.

As I like to tell people, give it a decade and we'll start seeing effective life extending drugs on or immediately near to marketing. It's not this shit, not a bunch of people showing off their unrelated research because they were invited and given free stuff or whatever.

Rather, working on actual biochemistry understanding of "aging" which is really just the breakdown of your DNA from too much errored replication over your life and the associated evolved sequences that try to mitigate or take advantage of this, we can see a way forward. Mice can already live longer on average than their normal life spans, our favorite lab test animals, so I say a decade (or more) for actual human applications on sale. The same exact principles that work on the mice seem fairly unchanged in humans, though their effectiveness due to varying metabolic rates and of course widely divergent DNA and environments and etc. means testing for quite a while.

Furthermore, as another comment stated, I don't want to live in a society where no one dies and would perpetually consider me "immature." Not only that, but I am cynical enough to honestly believe that there are some people the world is better off without - meaning it is already not soon enough before they die (politicians anyone?) - and that the proverbial "they" would simply use this as a means of staying "in power."

The premise of the article assumes consciousness resides in the brain, as a result of electrochemical reactions. Well, there's now abundant scientific evidence to support the existence of non-local consciousness, independent from the physical body, and that the brain is merely an interface mechanism allowing that non-local intelligence to interact in the physical world.

If this is true, the whole discussion should probably be around discovering a technological way to access that non-local intelligence, and forget about draining the brain into some machine.

Abundant scientific evidence..? ... Would you like to give a single citable example?

I can only assume from your use of nonlocal consciousness you are talking about a nonphysical mental/spiritual state, unless your talking about our consciousness being beamed to us from distant cosmic server farms in space. The true dualistic mind body problem in metaphysics is very old and very much disproved. The basic issue if you propose some nonphysical mental state, and idealistic mental essence that is not physical in nature, how does it influence the physical? Energy is physical so radio or micro waves don't count, what is the means of interface?

As I like to tell people, give it a decade and we'll start seeing effective life extending drugs on or immediately near to marketing.

Based on what? More wishful thinking?

When they finally are able to cure all cancer with a simple treatment, then maybe there will be some cause to think that they are starting to get a better handle on our biological machinery. Until then there is no cause for the life extension optimism.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Indeed, the idea of consciousness transfer is just nonsense. You will die and a separate entity will continue to act like you, talk like you but it will not be you.

A copy of me is not me.

I can't help myself at this point. But if we reduce consciousness as to emerging from cause and effect - wouldn't you emerge in point B in an altered from, from altered matter compared to point A in space-time. At which point do you discriminate from the matter from which this consciousness emerges as it does not exist in any point in between, and only at one point at a time?

To simplify. At any point, the stream-of-consciousness is an illusion. That consciousness exist only in the present. Whatever concept of a past, does not exist in physical reality.

Because I'm already playing devil's advocate at this point. Let's up the ante on the metaphysics.Consider point C, the "android-copy" and let's refute the order of events: A to B to C (for Copy.)

In other words: consider that the concept that time goes "forward" is without certainty. To this date, the standard argument towards the arrow of time is that (1) it is recognized by consciousness, (2) would render the world nonsensical, (3) makes no appearance in physical science.

Let's begin with point 3. Actual theoretical physicist are more familiar to the concept then me, but there are theories that describe the universe and it mechanisms in reverse time. As well as there are arguments that any mechanism can be reversed in this manner. Now, continuing from this concept: if we were to represent consciousness as a sheet of paper, and our memory as folds in the paper - the direction of time would be irrelevant to the functioning of consciousness. As time passes in a conventional matter, you'd fold the paper, and it would remember it. But in a reverse-time-symmetric universe, the paper would have the same memory although it unfolds through reverse-time.

My point is that the initial point (1) is a non-argument, because in both universes consciousness would construct a concept of "past" in the same manner. Point 2, that it would render the world nonsensical is essentially an argument from ignorance, and should be disregarded altogether. Point 3 is merely the consequence of the inability to observe the universe in any other direction, following point 1.

As I like to tell people, give it a decade and we'll start seeing effective life extending drugs on or immediately near to marketing.

Based on what? More wishful thinking?

When they finally are able to cure all cancer with a simple treatment, then maybe there will be some cause to think that they are starting to get a better handle on our biological machinery. Until then there is no cause for the life extension optimism.

Adding to what you said - I knew a cancer researcher at university who believed curing cancer with a magic bullet is near impossible since there are (if I remember correctly) about 7 things that must occur to make a cell cancerous and only a fraction of those factors will be the same case to case. That translates to each cancer being in essence a different disease, i.e: My brain cancer is not the same as your brain cancer simply because the factors that caused it cannot be 100% identical.

I thought a big part of the singularity was that one day, computers eventually surpass the human ability to *think*. The idea of the singularity as the "last human invention", because after computers are able to out think us, they can start to do so at an exponentially fast pace within a very short period of time.

I never took the singularity to be a good thing; merely a necessary one. I have always seen the melding of man and machine as a matter of necessity; to bind ourselves to our future robot overlords in a way that we're not completely redundant.

I guess that, in the context of the singularity, I'm not sure that cyborg bodies are incredibly relevant. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (while admittedly flawed in its execution) did probably the best job of exploring this I've seen: individual humans trapped by war/strife/economics become refugees of the human condition itself and willingly submit to membership in a collective consciousness. There's no body per se, just a collective and weapons through which to wage war on other consciousnesses.

Robot bodies always seemed like a transitory phase through which the machines could interact with other humans during a time when humans were uncomfortable with the concept of a consciousness existing outside a form that resembled the human shape.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Indeed, the idea of consciousness transfer is just nonsense. You will die and a separate entity will continue to act like you, talk like you but it will not be you.

A copy of me is not me.

Depends who's paying. From my perspective, sure, a copy of me is not me. But, again from my perspective, a copy of you is functionally you. That magic perspective you keep behind your eyes is not something I perceive or can view.

So forget about immortality for yourself (although some people will, no doubt, use it for themself, and afterwards will swear up and down they are the same). What we are talking about is immortality for other people. What other people? Could be your daughter who was killed in a car crash. Could be a CEO too valuable to lose -- would Apple have paid to keep Steve Jobs for a few more decades? I think they would. Could be a popular politician who is getting his political party ahead. Could certainly have been a politician reigning way past his time -- like Kim Jong-Il or Fidel Castro.

As I like to tell people, give it a decade and we'll start seeing effective life extending drugs on or immediately near to marketing.

Based on what? More wishful thinking?

When they finally are able to cure all cancer with a simple treatment, then maybe there will be some cause to think that they are starting to get a better handle on our biological machinery. Until then there is no cause for the life extension optimism.

Adding to what you said - I knew a cancer researcher at university who believed curing cancer with a magic bullet is near impossible since there are (if I remember correctly) about 7 things that must occur to make a cell cancerous and only a fraction of those factors will be the same case to case. That translates to each cancer being in essence a different disease, i.e: My brain cancer is not the same as your brain cancer simply because the factors that caused it cannot be 100% identical.

Cancer is pretty fundamental to our particular biological structure as multicellular organism. Basically the potential of a cell to go cancerous is pretty much a direct result of it being alive, as all a cancerous cell is in effect a cell or group of cells that refuses to die or stop reproducing at the command of the organism which it is part of. In this way cancer isn't so much a disease as in an outside malady affecting the system rather its a basic feature of the system. There are multicellular organisms that don't seem to suffer cancer, a friend of mine spent years in lab essentially putting starfish in blenders researching this, but they are all pretty distant from us.

(As a side note there was a statistical study done a few years ago looking at cancer survival rates that concluded that much of the progress in cancer treatment over that last 40 years is largely illusional, basically while there have been rare new treatments for specific types of cancer that are effective most cancer treatments are judged by survival rates over a cetain period of years, 5 years and so on, and while these have been increasing the study found this was mostly due to early diagnosis, in other words even with all the treatments developed and the fact that the person would live longer after the cancer was detected but this was because the cancer was detected earlier and in fact the patient was still dieing at roughly the same stage of the cancer developement )

So basically in order to actually cure cancer we'd have to have pretty much have almost complete understanding and control of what our cells actually do, which would be cool, but is actually still a fairly long way off.

On the other hand we already have some pretty dramatically life extending technologies in our homes namely portable water, flush toilets, and basic sanitation and when you think that during the late middle-ages one of the leading cause of death of a mature indivisual was tooth decay, and it was a particularly unpleasant way to go, I very very happy with that.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Indeed, the idea of consciousness transfer is just nonsense. You will die and a separate entity will continue to act like you, talk like you but it will not be you.

A copy of me is not me.

I can't help myself at this point. But if we reduce consciousness as to emerging from cause and effect - wouldn't you emerge in point B in an altered from, from altered matter compared to point A in space-time. At which point do you discriminate from the matter from which this consciousness emerges as it does not exist in any point in between, and only at one point at a time?

To simplify. At any point, the stream-of-consciousness is an illusion. That consciousness exist only in the present. Whatever concept of a past, does not exist in physical reality.

Because I'm already playing devil's advocate at this point. Let's up the ante on the metaphysics.Consider point C, the "android-copy" and let's refute the order of events: A to B to C (for Copy.)

In other words: consider that the concept that time goes "forward" is without certainty. To this date, the standard argument towards the arrow of time is that (1) it is recognized by consciousness, (2) would render the world nonsensical, (3) makes no appearance in physical science.

Let's begin with point 3. Actual theoretical physicist are more familiar to the concept then me, but there are theories that describe the universe and it mechanisms in reverse time. As well as there are arguments that any mechanism can be reversed in this manner. Now continuing from this concept, if we were to represent consciousness as a sheet of paper, and our memory as folds in the paper - the direction of time would be irrelevant to the functioning of consciousness. As time passes in a conventional matter, you'd fold the paper, and it would remember it. But in a time-symmetric universe, the paper would have the same memory although it unfolds through reverse-time.

My point is that the initial point (1) is a non-argument, because in both universes consciousness would construct a concept of "past" in the same manner. Point 2, that it would render the world nonsensical is essentially an argument from ignorance, and should be disregarded altogether.

If we accept this possibility, wouldn't you be the copy?

This is a pretty old problem in metaphysics with the property of identity as it relates to physical objects (humans included.) I personally view it as an entirely linguistic problem; one that is created by the way most languages treat nouns, proper nouns, and the concept of linguistic identity. If I have two tables which are physically identical, are they the same table? Of course not; they occupy different spaces at the same time.

If I take Julius Caesar (assuming that I am indeed in the year 55BC with a cloning machine) and clone him, is the clone Julius Caesar? Assume the clone is a perfect clone. That's a harder question to answer; the clone would have all the memories of Caesar and presumably react in the same way as the original uncloned Julius Caesar. Would it be proper to say that I have two Julius Caesars? If so, in what ways are they identical and when we say that they are, how much of that is our concept of linguistic identity as opposed to metaphysical identity? How can we tell them apart? There is something different about them (e.g. one is the "original" and one is the "clone") but what metaphysical test can we have for them?

This problem is as old as philosophy itself. It's what Plato referred to as "the forms", but in my mind it's simply due to the limitations we have with language, our understanding of the world, and a need to simplify/reconcile the two so that we can function in a system where we have to interact/communicate with other conscious entities. But what makes two consciousnesses the same? How can an individual know anything about another consciousness? How can I know that the consciousness of a human is any more or less like my own than a computer program?

If you buy into this, it's either incredibly liberating or incredibly depressing: my consciousness is just electrical impulses in a meat-computer, and no more or less meaningful than electrical impulses in a metal-computer. But metaphysicists have a hard time expressing the "consciousness as a resultant system of space-time-matter interaction" in a way that doesn't end up labeling obvious non-consciousnesses under the same umbrella as humans. IMO it's a limitation of linguistics and our need to group similar things under similar words, but that doesn't make the problem any easier to think about.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Indeed, the idea of consciousness transfer is just nonsense. You will die and a separate entity will continue to act like you, talk like you but it will not be you.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Indeed, the idea of consciousness transfer is just nonsense. You will die and a separate entity will continue to act like you, talk like you but it will not be you.

A copy of me is not me.

I can't help myself at this point. But if we reduce consciousness as to emerging from cause and effect - wouldn't you emerge in point B in an altered from, from altered matter compared to point A in space-time. At which point do you discriminate from the matter from which this consciousness emerges as it does not exist in any point in between, and only at one point at a time?

To simplify. At any point, the stream-of-consciousness is an illusion. That consciousness exist only in the present. Whatever concept of a past, does not exist in physical reality.

Because I'm already playing devil's advocate at this point. Let's up the ante on the metaphysics.Consider point C, the "android-copy" and let's refute the order of events: A to B to C (for Copy.)

In other words: consider that the concept that time goes "forward" is without certainty. To this date, the standard argument towards the arrow of time is that (1) it is recognized by consciousness, (2) would render the world nonsensical, (3) makes no appearance in physical science.

Let's begin with point 3. Actual theoretical physicist are more familiar to the concept then me, but there are theories that describe the universe and it mechanisms in reverse time. As well as there are arguments that any mechanism can be reversed in this manner. Now continuing from this concept, if we were to represent consciousness as a sheet of paper, and our memory as folds in the paper - the direction of time would be irrelevant to the functioning of consciousness. As time passes in a conventional matter, you'd fold the paper, and it would remember it. But in a time-symmetric universe, the paper would have the same memory although it unfolds through reverse-time.

My point is that the initial point (1) is a non-argument, because in both universes consciousness would construct a concept of "past" in the same manner. Point 2, that it would render the world nonsensical is essentially an argument from ignorance, and should be disregarded altogether.

If we accept this possibility, wouldn't you be the copy?

This is a pretty old problem in metaphysics with the property of identity as it relates to physical objects (humans included.) I personally view it as an entirely linguistic problem; one that is created by the way most languages treat nouns, proper nouns, and the concept of linguistic identity. If I have two tables which are physically identical, are they the same table? Of course not; they occupy different spaces at the same time.

If I take Julius Caesar (assuming that I am indeed in the year 55BC with a cloning machine) and clone him, is the clone Julius Caesar? Assume the clone is a perfect clone. That's a harder question to answer; the clone would have all the memories of Caesar and presumably react in the same way as the original uncloned Julius Caesar. Would it be proper to say that I have two Julius Caesars? If so, in what ways are they identical and when we say that they are, how much of that is our concept of linguistic identity as opposed to metaphysical identity? How can we tell them apart? There is something different about them (e.g. one is the "original" and one is the "clone") but what metaphysical test can we have for them?

This problem is as old as philosophy itself. It's what Plato referred to as "the forms", but in my mind it's simply due to the limitations we have with language, our understanding of the world, and a need to simplify/reconcile the two so that we can function in a system where we have to interact/communicate with other conscious entities. But what makes two consciousnesses the same? How can an individual know anything about another consciousness? How can I know that the consciousness of a human is any more or less like my own than a computer program?

If you buy into this, it's either incredibly liberating or incredibly depressing: my consciousness is just electrical impulses in a meat-computer, and no more or less meaningful than electrical impulses in a metal-computer. But metaphysicists have a hard time expressing the "consciousness as a resultant system of space-time-matter interaction" in a way that doesn't end up labeling obvious non-consciousnesses under the same umbrella as humans. IMO it's a limitation of linguistics and our need to group similar things under similar words, but that doesn't make the problem any easier to think about.

As a kid I heard an interesting lecture from a C of E Bishop ( I think he was a bishop ) in Jerusalem. Basically his point was the acient Hebrew that the old testament was written in was fundlementally different than the greek used in the early church, according to him unlike greek which is a noun heavy language this acient hebrew was verb based so instead of referring to a chair as an object it would be more correct to say it was an action. Chairing instead of chair, the act of being something that is sat upon. He then said that when God is referred to in these early text it is often in this verb form , that rather than God it is act of 'Goding'. As you can imagine ths blew my little mind.Now I have to say I have never heard this again, at least not that I can recall, not even during my religious studies in university, and I am far too lazy to actually learn acient hebrew myself or honestly even do a little simple research, and to be clear I'm about as firmly an atheist as you can logically be ... But still The idea itself was rather cool.

I'm an athiest. There's no special magic inside me powering my brain. It's all physics and chemistry and science. We'll be able to reproduce that in machinery and computers one day, or just upgrade what I have now so it lasts. I want that to happen before I die, or at least before my children die. Before my parents die seems unlikely, but I can hope.

No, I don't know the answers to all the many objections. But I would rather face those problems than die.

Yep well, I had my hopes set on a real American Space Program replete with a Mars landing by 1983. See how far that got me.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Indeed, the idea of consciousness transfer is just nonsense. You will die and a separate entity will continue to act like you, talk like you but it will not be you.

A copy of me is not me.

Depends who's paying. From my perspective, sure, a copy of me is not me. But, again from my perspective, a copy of you is functionally you. That magic perspective you keep behind your eyes is not something I perceive or can view.

So forget about immortality for yourself (although some people will, no doubt, use it for themself, and afterwards will swear up and down they are the same).

But this is what the article is about, I do not doubt that we will one day end up with cloning a person as a possibility but transferring can only work if you exist outside of your body and can only inhabit one physical presence at a time.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Indeed, the idea of consciousness transfer is just nonsense. You will die and a separate entity will continue to act like you, talk like you but it will not be you.

A copy of me is not me.

But you'll think you're you, and functionally, it will be you...

If you transfer information from a human brain into computer, there's no evidence it would think anything.

If you could simply dump the human brain into a database, and use an IBM Watson level computer to then process questions, it would most likely pass a turing test among people who knew the human source of the brain dump, but there would be no thinking/sentience involved.

At best this is a ghost remnant database of the human that once existed.

Does anyone else imagine some sort of hellish Prestige scenario when they think of consciousness transfer? The fact that it might be just like dying for you, but nobody else would ever know, is profoundly unsettling.

Indeed, the idea of consciousness transfer is just nonsense. You will die and a separate entity will continue to act like you, talk like you but it will not be you.

A copy of me is not me.

But you'll think you're you, and functionally, it will be you...

No "it" will think it is me for the fraction amount of time it takes for it to realise it is a separate person. I will continue to be me.

You could also program it to Say "Huh!", "What!" and "Cup of Tea please" but it still will not be Arthur Dent.

I'm an athiest. There's no special magic inside me powering my brain. It's all physics and chemistry and science. We'll be able to reproduce that in machinery and computers one day, or just upgrade what I have now so it lasts. I want that to happen before I die, or at least before my children die. Before my parents die seems unlikely, but I can hope.

No, I don't know the answers to all the many objections. But I would rather face those problems than die.

You do realize these are the same drivers behind religion. I really see this optimism about technological immortality as essentially the same wishful thinking as religious immortality.

At best in our lifetime, I would expect the best we could do is create technological ghosts to comfort/haunt the living.

As I like to tell people, give it a decade and we'll start seeing effective life extending drugs on or immediately near to marketing. It's not this shit, not a bunch of people showing off their unrelated research because they were invited and given free stuff or whatever.

Rather, working on actual biochemistry understanding of "aging" which is really just the breakdown of your DNA from too much errored replication over your life and the associated evolved sequences that try to mitigate or take advantage of this, we can see a way forward. Mice can already live longer on average than their normal life spans, our favorite lab test animals, so I say a decade (or more) for actual human applications on sale. The same exact principles that work on the mice seem fairly unchanged in humans, though their effectiveness due to varying metabolic rates and of course widely divergent DNA and environments and etc. means testing for quite a while.

What is the incentive from a government standpoint to having people live longer? Actually, they want quite the reverse. As does the insurance industry.

Can you imagine what a common life extension of say, 30 years would do to the actuarial tables? With no birth controls?!? Gaad.

No kidding, if lives were to be cheaply extended 20, 30 or 40 years beyond what they are now, you would have forced euthanasia. It's not the best and brightest that breed the fastest. Politically incorrect, but true.

The only solution would be; 'you want immortality? Great! We're going to cut off your balls…. Just lay them out here, you won't feel a thing.'The "every sperm is sacred" motif may work great in the movies but if immortality were an actual option, it would be a completely different story.

Without horrific, craconian controls, humanity would bury itself under it's own mass.